The Old Trade of Killing

by John Harris

  Nimmo cut across his chatter quickly, as though he were impatient. ‘We got talking,’ he said, ‘and decided the two of us couldn’t do it alone. We thought of Tiny.’

  ‘What about the rest of them?’ I asked, and he shrugged.

  ‘Married,’ he said shortly. ‘Well married. Kids. Business. Are you married?’

  I had been, but it had been a short-lived happiness and was none of Nimmo’s business.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He nodded and began to toy with the drawings, but, as I leaned over to have a second look, he closed the file. His eyes were bright and wary.

  ‘Even with Tiny and Jock, I knew we still couldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘We needed a mechanic. One who knew the desert, not some spanner-pusher from a London garage. You know what the desert’s like with vehicles.’ He nodded at Morena. ‘We found Wop. But even then we hadn’t the maps, and I’d found out there are still mines lying around loose down there, some of ’em the ones we laid, some of ’em Italian. Even with Morena we couldn’t find our way back.’ He paused and grinned. ‘But you might,’ he ended. ‘You had all the maps, and I knew you were a newspaperman and might have a few contacts who could help us.’

  I made my decision at once, almost without thinking really.

  ‘Better than that,’ I said. ‘I’ve still got my original map. I kept it all through the war. It’s still unmarked. I’ve got it in a drawer somewhere with my gongs and the bit of shrapnel they took out of my backside in Normandy.’

  ‘Then we can go?’

  ‘I should think so,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t be any difficulties. What about funds?’

  ‘We can raise them between us.’

  ‘What happens to the stuff if we find it?’

  ‘Surely we’ll get something out of it. The British Museum’s been breathing down my neck ever since I showed the bowl to them. Apart from that, though, I’ve always had a yen to have another look at the desert.’

  So had I. Many times. After the war was over it had taken years to get it out of my system, to shuffle off the memory of the silences, the cleanness and the brilliant nights that had made all the hardship worth while. After the desert, France and Germany had seemed as crowded as a Tube station and there’d never seemed to be enough elbow-room for honest-to-God fighting, with all the houses and the civilians and the things King’s Regulations and the Provost Marshal didn’t allow you to do.

  Nimmo had seen the look in my eye and he was grinning. ‘Houston’s a teacher but he says the school can go hang for a couple of months,’ he said. ‘Morena’s brother’s taken over his garage.’

  ‘And Tiny?’

  Leach guffawed. ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Except for cash. I just got fired.’

  I studied all the eager faces round me, then I nodded.

  ‘Let’s have another drink on it,’ I suggested.

  It seemed so simple then. But it didn’t work out quite like that. We fixed our date and all the major details, but when we turned up a month later for the meeting at which we intended to finalise things, it wasn’t Nimmo who appeared, but his son.

  Nimmo was dead.

  Two

  Young Jimmy Nimmo looked exactly like his father as he was on all those nostalgic photographs we brought out which we’d had made in Cairo and Alex during the war, and all those snapshots that had been taken with illicit cameras at Kufra and Siwa, where we’d been based between runs.

  He was tall, slender and red-haired, good-looking as hell and oozing the same sort of wicked charm. He hadn’t known us long before he started to produce the same outrageous stories of eager girls and frantic husbands as his father, who’d often kept us laughing even while we’d made the mental reservation not to lend him a pound the next time he asked, because he hadn’t yet paid back the last one he’d borrowed.

  He told us his father had been in a car crash on the M1 and that, just before he died, he’d sent for his son. His wife, apparently, had been out in the cold ever since the war and had long since gone back to living on her own money, but Nimmo had somehow kept in touch with his son and had felt the need to pass on to him the only thing of value he still possessed, the knowledge of where to find the treasure of the Qalam Depression.

  It was enough in all conscience for anybody, and if we found what I for one was beginning to hope we’d find, young Nimmo would be more than repaid for any filial love he’d felt for his father. By this time, I’d begun to think in terms of treasure-stuffed tombs and pharaohs’ curses and gold-encased sarcophagi behind dark embossed doors flanked by obsidian blocks that were set like sentinels into the faces of the cliffs of the Depression. But this wasn’t all. Whatever the intrinsic worth of what Nimmo said he’d found in the Qalam Depression, there was value in it for me as a story that might well bring in as much as the Kon-Tiki had brought in for Thor Heyerdahl.

  Nimmo had caught my imagination and I’d done all the work in London, even to getting visas for everybody and the correct permission from the Libyan Government to make the journey. We’d given ourselves a name just to obscure the object of our trip from inquisitive busybodies, and I’d also got my editor interested, and he’d agreed not to sign anyone on in my place until I returned to take up a renewed contract. He was offering no wages mind you, but in return for the story he was offering all the help he could give us in the way of contacts, even to the assistance of our man in Tripoli.

  Migliorini, who’d represented the paper in North Africa for years, was an Italian with a rather rococo way of writing English that sometimes stumped the subs, but he turned up trumps when it came to advice over routes and equipment. He sent me lists as long as your arm of things we might need, and information of all the new comforts and aids to living in the desert that had appeared since I’d left Africa. Half of them I’d never heard of, but Migliorini recommended them and, as he spent most of his life on the fringe of the desert, we accepted his suggestions.

  Morena, who shared a garage with his brother at Reading and knew all there was to know about lorries, had fixed us up with a Land Rover and a thirty-horsepower six-cylinder Austin lorry, with an engine like a lion, and the name ‘Daisy’ painted on the bonnet, just as he’d had during the war. The Austin looked a good vehicle, but, of course, we were all the time concerned with the amount of money we had at our disposal and we had to take it on trust a little. Even Morena couldn’t tell what damage it might have suffered before we’d seen it, or how long it might have been standing in a Service Corps park waiting for a buyer, but we had to take a chance on that. He’d fixed two hooks under the canopy frame for hammocks and air mattresses, because we remembered the ambulances during the war and what a joy it was to sleep on a bunk occasionally as a change from the hot sand, and we’d got a small transmitter-receiver in case of emergency, stored up against the cab with all our equipment.

  The Land Rover was an afterthought in a way, and had been bought on Morena’s advice because any penetration of the desert was always so inherently chancy a second vehicle was really essential in case of breakdown, and this vehicle we left reasonably clear to be used as a maid of all work.

  We all met in a pub at Harwich where we’d waited for D-Day and young Nimmo arrived with a square leather case on a sling over his shoulder.

  ‘What’s that?’ Houston demanded. ‘Mine detector?’

  Nimmo grinned. ‘Radio,’ he said. ‘Might come in useful. Cheer us up a bit.’

  ‘Oh!’ Like the rest of us, Houston didn’t belong to the generation that wore wireless sets as easily as clothes. ‘Looks like a coffin for a cat,’ he said.

  Like Leach, he’d been a little uncertain at first about young Nimmo and had made a great deal of having to share any of the profits of the expedition with someone who hadn’t even been in the desert when the treasure we were after had been found, but young Nimmo, of course, had the drawings his father had made and the bearings he’d taken and without them none of us could do anything. In the end, Houston’s muttering died away as he faced up
to the fact and, as young Nimmo had the same ability as his father to win people over, it wasn’t long before we all of us, Houston and Leach included, accepted him as a full member of the expedition.

  He had, in fact, a lot to offer that was helpful. He’d been for a time in Africa, though he didn’t tell us where or why, and he’d spent some of his short life working there, so he wasn’t entirely a stranger to the place, though Houston enjoyed telling him in the rich phrases of the Eighth Army that he needed to get some service in and ought to hurry up and get his knees brown. Nimmo grinned pleasantly enough and accepted the chaffing without resentment, though there were times when Houston’s assumption of superior knowledge grew a little wearing – even to me.

  He was in a gay – almost light-headed – mood and full of anecdotes about the war.

  ‘Remember that time…?’ he kept saying. ‘Remember the way it went?’

  Like Leach, he didn’t seem to have made much of his life after the war. He’d never once had a job of any responsibility, it seemed, and somehow it showed even in his clothes. Unlike Morena’s neat, well-cared-for equipment, his belongings were shabby and frayed, and, somehow, behind his humour he seemed a little forlorn. His gaiety seemed to spring from excitement at getting out of his rut for a while, and he was eager to celebrate on board during the crossing.

  ‘Let’s show ’em how to drink,’ he said. ‘Me and Chalky White drank all the way to Africa last time.’

  But it turned out that Morena and I didn’t drink much these days and in the end only Houston and young Nimmo really settled down to it, because, in addition, Leach was afraid of being seasick and the celebration turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax.

  ‘Well, Christ, you are a wet lot,’ Houston complained. ‘I thought it’d be like Corporal Curtis always used to say – with the corks going off right and left like file-firing.’

  It was a long drive through France and we used the tent instead of hotels because we wanted to save money. In Marseille we began to pick up the shrill overtones of the East and stood on the heights looking towards the sea between the Cathedral and the fantastic pinnacled Notre Dame de la Garde, knowing we were looking directly back at Africa.

  On the ship there was no awning against the sun and we panted against the ventilators, already aware of the heat.

  ‘Feel it?’ Houston said gaily. ‘The old oven. It was the same when we first came out. Jimmy Fidler said it was like his father’s bakery. Remember Jimmy Fidler?’

  Leach nodded in that slow fashion of his that seemed slower than ever after twenty years. ‘What ’appened to ’im?’ he asked.

  ‘Bought it on the first run up to Bardia,’ Morena said. ‘He was acting batman to Paddick, that major with the ginger moustache who went off his nut as a colonel.’

  Houston chuckled. ‘I remember him. The Brigadier got him posted – that little chap who looked like Monty. Maugham he was called. You never knew whether it was Muffam or Moom. He was caught by the Ities the first time we retreated and stood up in his car wearing all his tabs and medals and bawled ’em out in German until they let him go. He got ’em so they didn’t know whether they were sitting on pos or piano stools.’

  Nimmo laughed abruptly and his laughter had a derisive ring to it so that Houston looked round, his thin Scots face suddenly sharp-edged.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he demanded angrily.

  ‘God,’ Nimmo asked good-humouredly. ‘Don’t you ever forget?’

  ‘Don’t we ever forget what?’

  Nimmo moved his hand in a helpless gesture. ‘Anything,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the names off so pat. Every single one of ’em. Even after twenty years.’

  Houston’s eyes glittered, but Morena laughed before he could reply, and the awkward moment was turned aside. But Nimmo’s words had jarred Houston and damped our enthusiasm as though someone had thrown cold water over us. We’d all been looking forward to renewing the comradeship we’d felt in the desert, and his youthful realism was sinking it before it had even started to swim. That elusive something we were all reaching back to and trying to get hold of again had vanished at once, untouched.

  ‘Christ, man,’ Houston said, his face full of disappointment and indignation, ‘that brigadier became one of the big boys in the desert. Like Monty. I suppose even you’ve heard of bloody Monty?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve heard of Monty.’ Nimmo grinned, his face full of malicious glee now. ‘He’s that old bloke who keeps getting up on his hind legs and telling everybody how to run the show.’

  Houston gaped ‘That old bloke,’ he said. ‘If it weren’t for Monty – and me, and these lot – you’d have been a slave of Hitler’s Reich. You know what they were like rampaging round the Continent before the war.’

  Nimmo laughed. ‘I wasn’t born before the war,’ he pointed out.

  I looked at Morena with a feeling of shock. Surely all that many years hadn’t passed since the day we’d joined the army, surely all that much water hadn’t flowed under the bridge?

  I think it was then that I realised for the first time that Leach was not just ‘colossal’ any more. He’d become a fat man, and Houston was gaunt and dusty-looking and his thin lips were as cheerless as a railway track. Even Morena had the comfortable look of prosperity about him, and I began to wonder uneasily how different I looked.

  ‘You might show a bit of gratitude, all the same.’ Houston was speaking slowly, as though at a loss for something crushing to say in reply.

  ‘To listen to you blokes,’ Nimmo said cheerfully, ‘you’d think you’d saved the world from falling to pieces.’

  ‘Well, we did, didn’t we?’

  ‘Well, if you did, you didn’t make a very good job of it, because it’s in a nice mess again now.

  Leach and Houston were staring at Nimmo as though he were a foreigner. Suddenly, for all the link he had with us, he might have been a man from Outer Space.

  We stayed on deck all night in spite of the dew that soaked us through. We’d decided against cabins, thinking with nostalgia of the good old days when we’d slept out of doors for months at a time, but long before we were tired Houston was complaining about the cold. The decks were sodden and the rigging dripping and the only alternative was an evil-smelling lounge where people were snoring in ranks. On deck there was a bunch of Arabs singing in harsh unmusical voices.

  ‘They don’t change much, do they?’ Morena said.

  The sea wind had dropped as we winched alongside at Tripoli next morning, and the heat was already oppressive as the rising sun took all the moisture out of the air. But the town was up and about and teeming like a football crowd as we drove away from the great concrete quays that shone like old bones in the sun beside the flat dark water. The children came round us in shrieking hordes, shouting for alms, and Houston emptied his pockets of coins and flung them in a shower into the road, so that the yelling became a shrill baying as the children dived in the dust for them, dodging in and out of the traffic that was picking its way into the town.

  The Italians had made an effort to clean the place up and turn it into a modern city, but they’d never quite succeeded. They’d paved the native quarter and disinfected everything within reach and driven fine arcaded boulevards to east and west to make thoroughfares. But the narrow streets of the old city were still spanned by wooden poles covered with ancient vines that gave shade to the shop fronts and, underneath them, behind the colonnades, fountains played in hidden courtyards paved with mosaic and full of plants, and small shops displayed vivid carpets and leathers, the craftsmen cross-legged on the floor or sweating over their work – bakers with their charcoal ovens open to the pavement, smiths hammering copper, barbers with their rows of what looked like sheeted dead.

  And there were still beggars on every street, and starving children and flies and disease. Round the corner, where the new stores were, wealthy Arab women in fashionable hats were wearing the veil only as a formal strip of gauze across their mouths, but on the pavements among t
he arches the quacks still dispensed medicine like crown-and-anchor players on a plan of the human body, and yelling boys sold magazines of strip girls and half-naked he-men. There were still the rows of stalls covered by sticky sweetmeats and congealed dates, the gulls still shrieked over the garbage along the shore, and the youngsters still fought and yelled in the dust, as they were doing now, for the coins that were flung down for them.

  ‘Hasn’t changed much,’ Houston observed gaily, his thin face alight with nostalgic pleasure. ‘Flies. Beggars. Jig-jig. It was just the same in Alex when we came out in 1940.’

  It was the aperitif hour and the pavements were full of people: Arab sheikhs; Italian girls so beautiful they took your breath away; hawkers selling shoe-laces, nuts, live puppies, cages of budgerigars; gharries drawn by plumed horses with mixed cargoes of veiled Moslem women, European tourists, bespectacled typists from the embassies and spring-jawed, long-legged American colonels from the airfield just inland. The street was noisy with voices and blaring klaxons and the screaming engines of buses charging like wounded buffaloes, down towards the Arab quarter, their horns going in two notes, up and down in a maniac duotone.

  We had got our vehicles ashore without much difficulty and Migliorini was waiting for us at his office, small and dapper and eager to please. He greeted me like a long-lost brother. He’d been in London at one point and because we both knew the Western Desert we’d got on well at once.

  ‘Everythink’s ready,’ he said. ‘All you must do is take on the foods and pay the bill, then Bob’s your ankle. Up the Ayghth Army.’

  Nimmo stared at him. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Not another one.’

  We’d planned our route via the oases because we could remember only too well having to live on a pint or two of water a day, and none of us fancied trying it again. We paid for everything we bought out of the cash we kept in a tin box in the Land Rover and that evening we all went for a swim in the creamy surf of the Mediterranean just for old times’ sake.